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Tragic Kingdom: Sean Baker's 'The Florida Project'

In Sean Baker's new film, The Florida Project, "six-year-old Moonee and her two best friends spend the summer running wild on the grounds of the Magic Castle, a week-by-week motel just a mile away from Florida's Disney World," writes Amy Taubin. "For these children, overgrown weeds, deserted houses, and nearby posh hotels spell adventure, and seen through their eyes and the lenses of [cinematographer] Alexis Zabe's 35mm camera, theirs is a lushly tropical, dazzlingly colorful world."

"For this film, I wanted the audience to feel like they've spent the summer with these characters," Baker says. To read the full interview, click here.

"35mm anamorphic film was the perfect choice to evoke the soft, creamy, imperfect aesthetic Baker was after, writes Bill Desowitz. "'There are fewer and fewer opportunities to work on 35 and I really treasure it,' said Zabe, who shot with the Panavision Millennium xl2 and old E series lenses. 'It changes the whole dynamic on set and it plays better because of the moving grain and the mechanics of the camera. And when I talked to Sean about the mindset of the movie, we wanted to see the world as [the kids] see it. The metaphor was ice cream and colors and textures were surprising.'" To read the full article, click here.

"It was all about getting the audience to a place where they were with the kids first and foremost," Baker tells Marshall Shaffer. "We're playing with how much the kids would actually be aware of the circumstances around them in the situation they were in.

"Of course, that's a subjective thing, and you can't be 100% sure of how much children are absorbing or how much they are aware. But we wanted to play with that in the style of the film, treating the audience like they were one of the gang.

"I think audiences are also smart. They know. You don't have to feed them every single thing. They bring a certain amount of knowledge to a theater when they're watching a film." To read the full article, click here.

"Being in the Floridian environment, there's a sort of style that's imposed on you," Baker tells Guy Lodge. "My cinematographer and production designer really embraced those Floridian colors, so there's a hyper-reality to everything." To read the full interview, click here.